
THE SEER 
SUBSIDES 

BY DALLAS LORE SHARP 




Class~ES 1ZZ. $ 

Book lS b ■_ 

Copyright N".. 



cofjUight DEPosrr. 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 




IN THE DOORWAY, SLABS IDES 



THE 
SEER OF SLABSIDES 



BY 
DALLAS LORE SHARP 

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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1921 



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COPYRIGHT, IQIO, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 

COri RIGHT, 191 I AND 1921, BY DALLAS LORE SHARF 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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NOV -I |92| 



§)C!.A627524 






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TO 

HENRY FORD 

LOVER OF BIRDS 

FRIEND OF JOHN BURROUGHS 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 



THE 
SEER OF SLABSIDES 

i 

This title, "The Seer of Slabsides," does 
not quite fit John Burroughs — the Bur- 
roughs I knew. He was a see-er. A 
lover of nature, he watched the ways 
of bird and beast ; a lover of life, he 
thought out and wrought out a serene 
human philosophy that made him teach- 
er and interpreter of the simple and the 
near at hand rather than of such things 
as are hidden and far off. He was alto- 
gether human ; a poet, not a prophet ; a 
great lover of the earth, of his portion of 
it in New York State, and of everything 
and everybody dwelling there with him. 



4 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

He has added volumes to the area ot 
New York State, and peopled them with 
immortal folk — little folk, bees, blue- 
birds, speckled trout, and wild straw- 
berries. He was chiefly concerned with 
living at Slabsides, or at Woodchuck 
Lodge, and with writing what he lived. 
He loved much, observed and inter- 
preted much, speculated a little, but 
dreamed none at all. " The Lover of 
Woodchuck Lodge" I might have 
called him, rather than " The Seer of 
Slabsides. " 

Pietro, the sculptor, has made him rest- 
ing upon a boulder, his arm across his fore- 
head, as his eyes, shielded from the sun, 
peer steadily into the future and the far- 
away. I sat with the old naturalist on 
this same boulder. It was in October, and 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 5 

they laid him beside it the following 
April, on his eighty-fourth birthday. I 
watched him shield his eyes with his 
arm, as the sculptor has made him, and 
gaze far away over the valley to the roll- 
ing hills against the sky, where his look 
lingered, sadly, wearily, for a moment at 
their vaunting youth and beauty ; then 
coming instantly back to the field below 
us, he said : " This field is as full of 
woodchucks as it was eighty years ago. 
I caught one right here yesterday. How 
eternally interesting life is ! I Ve studied 
the woodchuck all my life, and there 's 
no getting to the bottom of him." 

He knew, as I knew, that he might 
never rest against this rock again. He 
had played upon it as a child. He now 
sleeps beside it. But so interesting was 



6 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

the simplest, the most familiar thing to 
him, that the long, long twilight, already 
filling the valley and creeping up toward 
him, still gave him a chance, as wc sat 
there, to watch the woodchuck slipping 
from his burrow. Had I been the sculp- 
tor, I should have made the old natural- 
ist lying flat on the round of that rock, 
his white beard a patch of lichen, his 
eyes peering from under his slouch hat 
over the top of the boulder at something 
near at hand — at the woodchuck feed- 
ing below in the pasture. 

He was the simplest man I ever knew, 
simpler than a child; for children are 
often self-conscious and uninterested, 
whereas Burroughs's interest] and curios- 
ity grew with the years, and his direct- 
ness, his spontaneity, his instant pleasure 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 7 

and his constant joy in living, his utter 
naturalness and naivete amounted to 
genius. They were his genius — and a 
stumbling-block to many a reader. Simi- 
lia similibus curantur, or a thief to catch 
a thief, as we say ; and it certainly re- 
quires such a degree of simplicity to un- 
derstand Burroughs as few of us possess. 
Not every author improves upon per- 
sonal acquaintance, but an actual visit 
with Burroughs seems almost necessary 
for the right approach to his books. 
Matter and manner, the virtues and 
faults of his writings, the very things he 
did not write about, are all explained in 
the presence of a man of eighty-three 
who brings home a woodchuck from the 
field for dinner, and saves its pelt for a 
winter coat. And with me at dinner 



8 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

that day were other guests, a lover of 
Whitman from Bolton, England, a dis- 
tinguished American artist, and others. 
The country road, hardly more than 
a farm lane, shies up close to Wood- 
chuck Lodge as it goes by. Here on the 
vine-grown porch was the cot of the 
old naturalist, as close to the road as it 
could get. Burroughs loved those remote 
ancestral hills, and all the little folk who 
inhabitated them with him. He was as 
retiring and shy as a song sparrow — 
who nests in the bushes, and sings from 
the fence stake. No man loved his fel- 
low-man more than Burroughs. Here 
in his cot he could watch the stars come 
out upon the mountain-tops and see the 
fires of dawn kindle where the stars had 
shone, and here, too, he could see every 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 9 

passer-by and, without rising, for he had 
need to rest, he could reach out a hand 
of welcome to all who stopped on their 
journey past. 

And everybody stopped. If he had no 
fresh woodchuck to serve them, he would 
have one out of a can, for no less in his 
home than in his heart had he made 
provision for the coming guest. The 
stores of the village were far away, but 
there was no lack of canned woodchuck 
and hospitality in the Lodge. Few men 
have had more friends or a wider range 
of friends than Burroughs. And months 
later, as I sat looking over the strange 
medley of them gathered at his funeral, 
I wondered at them, and asked myself 
what was it in this simple, childlike 
man, this lover of the bluebird, of the 



io THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

earth on his breast and the sky on his 
back, that drew these great men and lit- 
tle children about him. He was ele- 
mental. He kept his soul. And through 
the press men crowded up to touch him, 
and the virtue that went out from him 
restored to them their souls — their blue- 
bird with the earth on its breast and the 
sky, the blue sky, on its back #i 



II 

And this same restoration I find in his 
books. John Burroughs began that long 
line of books by writing an essay for the 
"Atlantic Monthly," entitled "Expres- 
sion," — "a somewhat Emersonian Ex- 
pression," says its author, — which was 
printed in the "Atlantic" for Novem- 
ber, i860, sixty-one years ago; and in 
each of those sixty-one years he has not 
failed to publish one or more essays here 
where "Expression" led the way. 

Sixty-one years are not threescore and 
ten, being nine years short. Many men 
have lived and wrought for more than 
threescore and ten years ; but Burroughs's 
"Atlantic" years are unique. To write 



12 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

without a break for sixty-one years, and 
keep one's eye undimmed, one's natural 
force unabated, one's soul unfagged and 
as fresh as dawn, is of itself a great hu- 
man achievement. 

Only a few weeks before his death he 
sent me a copy of the last book that he 
should see through the press, and who 
shall say that "Accepting the Universe" 
lacks anything of the vigor or finish or 
freshness found in his earliest books? It 
is philosophical, theological, indeed, in 
matter, and rather controversial in style; 
its theme is like that of "The Light of 
Day," a theme his pen was ever touch- 
ing, but nowhere with more largeness 
and beauty (and inconsistency) than here. 
For Burroughs, though deeply religious, 
was a poor theologian. He hated cant, and 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 13 

feared the very vocabulary of theology as 
he feared the dark. Life was remarkably 
single with Burroughs and all of a piece. 
In a little diary, one of the earliest he 
has left us, he asks, under date of October 
8, i860 (a month before his first essay 
appeared in the " Atlantic ") : 

"Is there no design of analogy in this 
Universe? Are these striking resem- 
blances that wed remote parts, these 
family traits that break out all through 
nature and that show the unity of the 
creating mind, the work of chancel 
Are these resemblances and mutual an- 
swerings of part to part that human in- 
telligence sees and recognizes only in its 
most exalted moments — when its vision 
is clearest — a mere accident r" 

That was written in pencil filling a 



14 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

whole page of his diary for i860. On 
page 220 of " Accepting the Universe/' 
published sixty-one years later, and only 
a short time before his death, we find 
this attempted answer : 

" So, when we ask, Is there design in 
Nature ? we must make clear what part 
or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we 
say that the cosmos as a whole shows 
any design in our human sense of the 
word ? I think not. The Eternal has no 
purpose that our language can compass. 
There can be neither center nor circum- 
ference to the Infinite. The distribution 
of land and water on the globe cannot be 
the result of design any more than can 
the shapes of the hills and mountains, or 
Saturn's rings, or Jupiter's moons. The 
circular forms and orbits of the universe 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 15 

must be the result of the laws of matter 
and force that prevail in celestial me- 
chanics ; this is not a final solution of 
the riddle, but is as near as we can come 
to it. One question stands on another 
question, and that on another, and so on, 
and the bottom question we can never 
reach and formulate. " 

It is a beautiful illustration of the con- 
tinuity, the oneness of this singularly 
simple life ; and it is as good an illustration 
of how the vigor of his youth steadies 
into a maturity of strength with age, 
which in many a late essay — as in " The 
Long Road," for instance — lifts one 
and bears one down the unmeasured 
reaches of geologic time as none of his 
earlier chapters do. 

Many men have written more than 



16 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

John Burroughs. His twenty-five vol- 
umes are perhaps nothing remarkable for 
sixty years of steady writing. But it 
is remarkable to come up to four and 
eighty with one book just off the press, 
two more books in manuscript to appear 
after the light has failed ; for there is still 
a book of miscellaneous papers, and some 
studies on Emerson and Thoreau yet to 
be published. 

And I think it a rather remarkable 
lot of books, beginning with " Wake- 
Robin," running down through the ti- 
tles, with " Winter Sunshine," " Birds 
and Poets," " Locusts and Wild Honey," 
"Pepacton," " Fresh Fields," "Signs 
and Seasons," " Riverby," " Far and 
Near," "Ways of Nature," "Leaf and 
Tendril," "The Summit of the Years," 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 17 

"Time and Change, " "The Breath of 
Life/' " Under the Apple-Trees," and 
"Field and Study/' to "Accepting the 
Universe," for these books deal very 
largely with nature, and by themselves 
constitute the largest, most significant 
group of nature-books that have come, 
perhaps, from any single pen. 

These sixteen or seventeen volumes 
are John Burroughs's most characteristic 
and important work. If he has done any 
desirable thing, made any real contribu- 
tion to American literature, that contri- 
bution will be found among these books. 
His other books are eminently worth 
while: there is reverent, honest thinking 
in his religious essays, a creedless but an 
absolute and joyous faith ; there is sim- 
ple and exquisite feeling in his poems; 



1 8 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

close analysis and an unmitigatedness 
wholly Whitmanesque in his interpreta- 
tion of Whitman ; and no saner, happier 
criticism anywhere than in his " Liter- 
ary Values. " There are many other ex- 
cellent critics, however, many poets and 
religious writers, many other excellent 
nature-writers, too ; but is there any other 
who has written so much upon the ways 
of nature as they parallel and cross the 
ways of men, upon so great a variety of 
nature's forms and expressions, and done 
it with such abiding love, with such 
truth and charm? 

Yet such a comparison is beyond 
proof, except in the least of the literary 
values — mere quantity; and it may be 
with literature as with merchandise: the 
larger the cask the greater the tare. 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 19 

Charm ? Is not charm that which / 
chance to like, or you chance to like ? 
Others have written of nature with as 
much love and truth as has John Bur- 
roughs, and each with his own peculiar 
charm : Audubon, with the spell of wild 
places and the thrill of fresh wonder ; 
Traherne, with the ecstasy of the reli- 
gious mystic ; Gilbert White, with the 
sweetness of the evening and the morn- 
ing ; Thoreau, with the heat of noon- 
day; Jefferies, with just a touch of twi- 
light shadowing all his pages. We want 
them severally as they are; John Bur- 
roughs as he is, neither wandering " lonely 
as a cloud 5 ' in search of poems, nor 
skulking in the sedges along the banks 
of the Guaso Nyero looking for lions. 
We want him at Slabsides, near his 



20 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

celery fields, or at Woodchuck Lodge 
overlooking the high fields that run down 
from the sky into Montgomery Valley. 
And whatever the literary quality of our 
other nature-writers, no one of them has 
come any nearer than John Burroughs to 
that difficult ideal — a union of thought 
and form, no more to be separated than 
the heart and the bark of a live tree. 

Take John Burroughs's work as a 
whole, and it is beyond dispute the most 
complete, the most revealing, of all our 
outdoor literature. His pages lie open 
like the surface of a pond, sensitive to 
every wind, or calm as the sky, holding 
the clouds and the distant blue, and the 
dragon-fly, stiff-winged, and pinned to 
the golden knob of a spatter-dock. 

All outdoor existence, all outdoor 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 21 

phenomena, are deeply interesting to 
him. There is scarcely a form of out- 
door life, scarcely a piece of landscape, 
or natural occurrence characteristic of 
the Eastern States, which has not been 
dealt with suggestively in his pages : the 
rabbit under his porch, the paleozoic peb- 
ble along his path, the salt breeze borne 
inland by the Hudson, the whirl of a snow- 
storm, the work of the honey bees, the 
procession of the seasons over Slabsides, 
even the abundant soil out of which he 
and his grapes grew and which, "incor- 
ruptible and undefiled," he calls divine. 
He devotes an entire chapter to the 
bluebird, a chapter to the fox, one to 
the apple, another to the wild straw- 
berry. The individual, the particular 
thing, is always of particular interest to 



22 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

him. But so is its habitat, the whole of 
its environment. Ke sees the gem, not 
cut and set in a ring, but rough in the 
mine, where it glitters on the hand of 
nature, and glitters all the more that it 
is worn in the dark. Naturally John Bur- 
roughs has written much about the 
birds; yet he is not an ornithologist. 
His theme has not been this or that, but 
nature in its totality, as it is held within 
the circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, 
supports, and quickens him. 

That nature does support and quicken 
the spiritual of him, no less than the 
physical, is the inspiration of his writ- 
ing and the final comment it requires. 
Whether the universe was shaped from 
chaos with man as its end, is a question 
of real concern to John Burroughs, but 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 23 

of less concern to him than the problem 
of shaping himself to the universe, of 
living as long as he can upon a world so 
perfectly adapted to life, if only one be 
physically and spiritually adaptable. To 
take the earth as one finds it, to plant 
one's self in it, to plant one's roof-tree 
in it, to till it, to understand it and the 
laws which govern it, and the Perfection 
which created it, and to love it all — this 
is the heart of John Burroughs's religion, 
the pith of his philosophy, the conclu- 
sion of his books. 

But if a perfect place for the fit, how 
hard a place is this world for the lazy, 
the ignorant, the stubborn, the weak, 
the physically and spiritually ill! So 
hard that a torpid liver is almost a mor- 
tal handicap, the stars in their courses 



24 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

fighting against the bilious to defeat 
them, to drive them to take exercise, to 
a copious drinking of water, to a knowl- 
edge of burdock and calomel — to obedi- 
ence and understanding. 

Underlying all of John Burroughs^ 
thought and feeling, framing every one 
of his books, is a deep sense of the per- 
fection of nature, the sharing of which 
is physical life, the understanding of 
which is spiritual life, is knowledge of 
God himself, in some part of His per- 
fection. " I cannot tell what the simple 
apparition of the earth and sky mean to 
me; I think that at rare intervals one 
sees that they have an immense spirit- 
ual meaning, altogether unspeakable, 
and that they are the great helps, after 
all." How the world was made — its 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 25 

geology, its biology — is the great ques- 
tion, for its answer is poetry and reli- 
gion and life itself. John Burroughs was 
serenely sure as to how the world was 
made; the theological speculation as to 
why it was made, he answered by grow- 
ing small fruits on it, living upon it, 
writing about it. 

Temperamentally John Burroughs was 
an optimist, as vocationally he was a 
writer, and avocationally a vine-drcsser. 
He planted and expected to gather — 
grapes from his grapevines, books from 
his book-vines, years, satisfactions, sor- 
rows, joys, all that was due him. 

The waters know their own and draw 

The brook that springs in yonder heights; 

So flows the good with equal law 
Unto the soul of pure delights. 



26 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

And what is it that was due him ? 
Everything; everything essential; as 
everything essential is due the pine- 
tree, the prairie, the very planet. Is not 
this earth a star? Are not the prairie, 
the pine-tree, and man the dust of stars? 
each a part of the other ? all parts of 
one whole — a universe, round, rolling, 
without beginning, without end, with- 
out flaw, without lack, a universe self- 
sustained, perfect? 

I stay my haste, I make delays, 
For what avails this eager pace ? 

I stand amid the eternal ways, 

And what is mine shall know my face, 

John Burroughs came naturally by such 
a view of nature and its consequent opti- 
mism. It was due partly to his having 
been born and brought up on a farm 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 27 

where he had what was due him from 
the start. Such birth and bringing-up is 
the natural right of every boy. To know 
and to do the primitive, the elemental ; 
to go barefoot, to drive the cows, to 
fish, and to go to school with not too 
many books, but with "plenty of real 
things " — these are nominated in every 
boy's bond. 

Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 

is the poem of a childhood on the farm, 
and the poem of a manhood on the farm, 
in spite of the critic who says: 

" We have never ceased to wonder 
that this friend of the birds, this kindly 
interpreter of nature in all her moods, 
was born and brought up on a farm; it. 
was in that smiling country watered by 
the east branch of the Delaware. No 



28 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

man, as a rule, knows less about the 
colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is 
more indifferent to natural scenery than 
the man born to the soil, who delves in 
it and breathes its odors. Contact with 
it and laborious days seem to deaden his 
faculties of observation and deprive him 
of all sympathy with nature." 

During the days when the deadening 
might have occurred, John Burroughs 
was teaching school. Then he became 
a United States bank examiner, and only 
after that returned to the country — to 
Riverby and Slabsides, and Woodchuck 
Lodge, — to live out the rest of his years, 
years as full of life and books as his vines 
along the Hudson are full of life and 
grapes. 

Could it be otherwise? If men and 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 29 

grapes are of the same divine dust, should 
they not grow according to the same 
divine laws? Here in the vineyard along 
the Hudson, John Burroughs planted 
himself in planting his vines, and every 
trellis that he set has become his own 
support and stay. The very clearing of 
the land for his vineyard was a prepara- 
tion of himself physically and morally 
for a more fruitful life. 

" Before the snow was off in March," 
he says in "Literary Values," "we set 
to work under-draining the moist and 
springy places. My health and spirits 
improved daily. I seemed to be under- 
draining my own life and carrying off 
the stagnant water, as well as that of 
the land." And so he was. There are 
other means of doing it — taking drugs, 



}o THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

playing golf, walking the streets; but 
surely the advantages and the poetry are 
all in favor of the vineyard. And how 
much fitter a place the vineyard to mel- 
low and ripen life, than a city roof of 
tarry pebbles and tin! 

Though necessarily personal and sub- 
jective, John Burroughs's writing is en- 
tirely free from self-exploitation and 
confession. There are pages scattered 
here and there dealing briefly and frankly 
with his own natural history, but our 
thanks are due to John Burroughs that 
he never made a business of watching 
himself. Once he was inveigled by a 
magazine editor into doing "An Ego- 
tistical Chapter," wherein we find him 
as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and 
capable at that age of feeding for a 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 31 

whole year upon Dr. Johnson ! Then 
we find him reading Whipple's essays, 
and the early outdoor papers of Higgin- 
son ; and later, at twenty-three, settling 
down with Emerson's essays, and getting 
one of his own into the " Atlantic 
Monthly." 

How early his own began to come to 
him ! 

That first essay in the "Atlantic" 
was followed by a number of outdoor 
sketches in the New York " Leader " — 
written, Burroughs says, " mainly to 
break the spell of Emerson's influence 
and get upon ground of my own." He 
succeeded in both purposes ; and a large 
and exceedingly fertile piece of ground 
it proved to be, too, this which he got 
upon ! Already the young writer had 



32 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

chosen his field and his crop. The out- 
of-doors has been largely his literary 
material, as the essay has been largely 
his literary form, ever since. He has 
done other things — volumes of literary 
studies and criticisms ; but his theme 
from first to last has been the Great Book 
of Nature, a page of which, here and 
there, he has tried to read to us. 

Burroughs's work, in outdoor liter- 
ature, is a distinct species, with new 
and well-marked characteristics. He is 
the nature-writer, to be distinguished 
from the naturalist in Gilbert White, the 
mystic in Traherne, the philosopher in 
Emerson, the preacher, poet, critic in 
Thoreau, the humorist in Charles Dudley 
Warner. As we now know the nature- 
writer we come upon him for the first 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 33 

time in John Burroughs. * Such credit 
might have gone to Thomas Wentworth 
Higginson, had he not been something 
else before he was a lover of nature — of 
letters first, then of flowers, carrying his 
library into the fields; whereas Bur- 
roughs brings the fields into the library. 
The essay whose matter is nature, whose 
moral is human, whose manner is strictly 
literary, belongs to John Burroughs. His 
work is distinguished by this threefold 
and even emphasis. In almost every other 
of our early outdoor writers either the 
naturalist or the moralist or the stylist 
holds the pen. 

Early or late, this or that, good out- 
door writing must be marked, first, by 
fidelity to fact ; and, secondly, by sin- 
cerity of expression. Like qualities mark 



34 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

all good literature; but they are them- 
selves the very literature of nature. When 
we take up a nature-book we ask (and it 
was Burroughs who taught us to ask), 
"Is the record true? Is the writing 
honest ?" 

In these many volumes by John Bur- 
roughs there are many observations, and 
it is more than likely that some of them 
may be wrong, but it is not possible 
that any of them could be mixed with 
observations that Burroughs knows he 
never made. If Burroughs has written 
a line of sham natural history, which line 
is it? In a preface to "Wake-Robin," 
the author says his readers have some- 
times complained that they do not see 
the things which he sees in the woods; 
but I doubt if there ever was a reader 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 35 

who suspected John Burroughs of not 
seeing the things. 

His reply to these complaints is sig- 
nificant, being in no manner a defense, 
but an exquisite^explanation, instead, of 
the difference between the nature which 
anybody may see in the woods and the 
nature that every individual writer, be- 
cause he is a writer, and an individual, 
must put into his book: a difference like 
that between the sweet-water gathered 
by the bee from the flowers and the drop 
of acid-stung honey deposited by the bee 
in the comb. The sweet-water under- 
goes a chemical change in being brought 
to the hive, as the wild nature under- 
goes a literary change — by the addition 
of the writer's self to the nature, while 
with the sweet-water it is by the addi- 
tion of the bee. 



36 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

One must be able to walk to an edi- 
torial office and back, and all the way- 
walk humbly with his theme, as Bur- 
roughs ever does — not entirely for- 
getful of himself, nor of me (because he 
has invited me along) ; but I must be 
quiet and not disturb the fishing — if we 
go by way of a trout-stream. 

True to the facts, Burroughs is a 
great deal more than scientific, for he 
loves the things — the birds, hills, sea- 
sons — as well as the truths about them ; 
and true to himself, he is not by any means 
a simple countryman who has never seen 
the city, a natural idyl, who lisps in 
books and essays, because the essays 
come. He is fully aware of the thing 
he wants to do, and by his own confes- 
sion has a due amount of trouble shap- 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 37 

ing his raw material into finished literary 
form. He is quite in another class from 
the authors of " The Complete Angler " 
and "New England's Rarities Discov- 
ered." In Isaak Walton, to quote Leslie 
Stephen, "a happy coinbination of circum- 
stances has provided us with a true coun- 
try idyl, fresh and racy from the soil, 
not consciously constructed by the most 
skillful artistic hand." 

Now the skillful artistic hand is 
everywhere seen in John Burroughs. 
What writer in these days could expect 
happy combinations of circumstances 
in sufficient numbers for so many vol- 
umes ? 

But being an idyl, when you come to 
think of it, is not the result of a happy 
combination of circumstances, but rather 



38 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

of stars — of horoscope. You are born an 
idyl or you are not, and where and when 
you live has nothing to do with it. 

Who would look for a true country 
idyl to-day in the city of Philadelphia ? 
Yet one came out of there yesterday, 
and lies here open before me, on the 
table. It is a slender volume, called 
" With the Birds, An Affectionate Study," 
by Caroline Eliza Hyde. The author is 
discussing the general subject of nomen- 
clature and animal distribution, and says : 

"When the Deluge covered the then 
known face of the earth, the birds were 
drowned with every other living thing, 
except those that Noah, commanded 
by God, took two by two into the Ark. 

" When I reflect deeply and earnestly 
about the Ark, as every one should, 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 39 

thoughts crowd my mind with an irre- 
sistible force." 

[And they crowd my mind, too.] 
" Noah and his family had preserved 
the names of the birds given them by 
Adam. This is assured, for Noah sent a 
raven and a dove out to see if the waters 
had abated, and we have birds of that 
name now. Nothing was known of our 
part of the globe, so these birds must 
have remained in the Holy Land for 
centuries. We do not hear of them until 
America was discovered. . . . 

"Bats come from Sur. They are very 
black mouse-like birds, and disagreeable. 
. . . The bobolink is not mentioned in 
the Bible, but it is doubtless a primitive 
bird. The cock that crows too early in 
the morning . . . can hardly be classed 



4 o THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

with the song-birds. The name of the 
humming-bird is not mentioned in the 
Bible, but as there is nothing new under 
the sun, he is probably a primitive bird." 

Burroughs would have agreed that the 
humming-bird is probably a primitive 
bird ; and also that this is a true idyl, 
and that he could not write a true idyl 
if he tried. No one could write like that 
by trying. And what has any happy 
combination of circumstances to do with 
it? No, a book essentially is only a per- 
sonality in type, and he who would not 
be frustrated of his hope to write a true 
idyl must himself be born a true idyl. 
A fine Miltonic saying! 

John Burroughs was not an idyl, but an 
essayist, with a love for books only sec- 
ond to his love for nature ; a watcher in 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 41 

the woods, a tiller of the soil, a reader, 
critic, thinker, poet, whose chief busi- 
ness these sixty years has been the inter- 
pretation of the out-of-doors. 

Upon him as interpreter and observer, 
certain of his books, " Ways of Nature" 
and "Leaf and Tendril," are an interest- 
ing comment. 

Truth does not always make good 
literature, not when it is stranger than 
fiction, as it often is; and the writer who 
sticks to the truth of nature must some- 
times do it at the cost of purely literary 
ends. Have I sacrificed truth to liter- 
ature ? asks Burroughs of his books. 
Have I seen in nature the things that 
are there, or the strange man-things, 
the " winged creeping things which have 
four feet," and which were an abomina- 



42 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

tion to the ancient Hebrews, but which 
the readers of modern nature-writing 
do greedily devour — are these the things 
I have seen ? And for an answer he sets 
about a reexamination of all he has 
written, from " Wake-Robin" to "Far 
and Near," hoping "that the result of 
the discussion or threshing will not be 
to make the reader love the animals less, 
but rather to love the truth more." 

But the result, as embodied in "Ways 
of Nature" and in " Leaf and Tendril," 
is quite the opposite, I fear ; for these 
two volumes are more scientific in tone 
than any of his other work ; and it is 
the mission, not of science, but of liter- 
ature, to quicken our love for animals, 
even for truth. Science only adds to the 
truth. Yet here, in spite of himself, 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 43 

Burroughs is more the writer, more the 
interpreter, than the investigator. He 
is constantly forgetting his scientific the- 
sis, as, for instance, in the account of 
his neighbor's errant cow. He succeeds 
finally, however, in reducing her fairly 
well to a mechanical piece of beef act- 
ing to vegetable stimuli upon a nerve 
ganglion located somewhere in the re- 
gion between her horns and her tail. 

Now, all this is valuable, and the use 
made of it is laudable, but would we not 
rather have the account than the cow, 
especially from Burroughs ? Certainly, 
because to us it is the account that he 
has come to stand for. And so, if we 
do not love his scientific animals more, 
and his scientific findings more, we 
shall, I think, love all his other books 



44 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

more; for we see now that, from the 
beginning, he has regarded the facts of 
nature as the solid substance of his books, 
to be kept as free from fancy and from 
false report, as his interpretation of them 
is to be kept free from all exaggeration 
and cant. 

Here, then, are a score of volumes of 
honest seeing, honest feeling, honest 
reporting. Such honesty of itself may 
not make good nature-literature, but 
without such honesty there can be no 
good nature-literature. 

Nature-literature is not less than the 
truth, but more ; how much more, 
Burroughs himself suggests to us in a 
passage about his literary habits. 

" For my part," he says, " I can never 
interview Nature in the reporter fashion. 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 45 

I must camp and tramp with her to get 
any good, and what I get I absorb through 
my emotions rather than consciously 
gather through my intellect, . . . An 
experience must lie in my mind a cer- 
tain time before I can put it upon paper 
— say from three to six months. If there 
is anything in it, it will ripen and mel- 
low by that time. I rarely take any 
notes, and I have a very poor memory, 
but rely upon the affinity of my mind 
for a certain order of truths or observa- 
tions. What is mine will stick to me, 
and what is not will drop off. We who 
write about Nature pick out, I suspect, 
only the rare moments when we have 
had glimpses of her, and make much of 
them. Our lives are dull, our minds 
crusted over with rubbish like those of 



46 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

pther people. Then writing about Na- 
ture, or about most other subjects, is an 
expansive process ; we are under the law 
of evolution; we grow the germ into 
the tree ; a little original observation goes 
a good way." For " when you go to 
Nature, bring us good science or else 
good literature, and not a mere inventory 
of what you have seen. One demon- 
strates, the other interprets." 

Careful as John Burroughs has been 
with his facts, so careful as often to bring 
us excellent science, he yet has left us 
no inventory of the out-of-doors. His 
work is literature ; he is not a demon- 
strator, but an interpreter, an expositor 
who is true to the text and true to the 
whole of the context. 

Our pleasure in Burroughs as an 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 47 

interpreter comes as much from his 
wholesome good sense, from his balance 
and sanity, I think, as from the assur- 
ance of his sincerity. Free from pose 
and cant and deception, he is free also 
from bias and strain. There is something 
ordinary, normal, reasonable, compan- 
ionable, about him ; an even tenor to 
all his ways, a deliberateness, naturalness 
to all his paths, as if they might have 
been made originally by the cows. So 
they were. 

If Burroughs were to start from 
my door for a tramp over these small 
Hingham hills he would cross the trout- 
brook by my neighbor's stone bridge, 
and, nibbling a spear of peppermint on 
the way, would follow the lane and the 
cow-paths across the pasture. Thoreau 



48 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

would pick out the deepest hole in the 
brook and try to swim across; he would 
leap the stone walls of the lane, cut a 
bee-line through the pasture, and drop, 
for his first look at the landscape, to 
the bottom of the pit in the seam-face 
granite quarry. Here he would pull out his 
notebook and a gnarly wild apple from 
his pocket, and, intensely, critically, 
chemically, devouring said apple, make 
note in the book that the apples of Eden 
were flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but 
this wild, tough, wretched, impossible 
apple of the Hingham hills united all 
ambrosial essences in its striking odor 
of squash-bugs. 

Burroughs takes us along with him. 
Thoreau comes upon us in the woods — 
jumps out at us from behind some bush, 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 49 

with a "Scat!" Burroughs brings us 
home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves 
us tangled up in the briars. 

It won't hurt us to be jumped at now 
and then and told to "scat!" It won't 
hurt us to be digged by the briars. It is 
good for us, otherwise we might forget 
that we are beneath our clothes. It is 
good for us and highly diverting, — and 
highly irritating too. 

But Thoreau stands alone. "Walden 
Pond" is one of America's certain con- 
tributions to the world's great books. 

For my part, when I take up an out- 
door book I am glad if there is quiet in 
it, and fragrance, and something of the 
saneness and sweetness of the sky. Not 
that I always want sweet skies. It is 
ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and 



So THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

three weeks since there fell a drop of 
rain. I could sing like a robin for a siz- 
zling, crackling thunder-shower — less 
for the sizzling and crackling than for 
the shower, Thoreau is a succession of 
showers — "tempests" ; his pages are 
sheet-lightning, electrifying, purifying, 
illuminating, but not altogether condu- 
cive to peace. " Walden Pond" is some- 
thing more than a nature book. There 
is a clear sky to most of Burroughs's 
pages, a rural landscape, wide, gently 
rolling, with cattle standing here and 
there beneath the trees. 

Burroughs's natural history is entirely 
natural, his philosophy entirely reason- 
able, his religion and ethics very much 
of the kind we wish our minister and 
our neighbor might possess; and his 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 51 

manner of writing is so unaffected that 
we feel we could write in such a manner 
ourselves. Only we cannot. 

Since the time he can be said to have 
"led" a life, Burroughs has led a literary 
life ; that is to say, nothing has been 
allowed to interfere with his writing ; 
yet the writing has not been allowed 
to interfere with a quiet successful busi- 
ness — with his raising of grapes. 

He has a study and a vineyard. 

Not many men ought to live by the 
pen alone. A steady diet of inspiration 
and words is hard on the literary health. 
The writing should be varied with some 
good, wholesome work, actual hard work 
for the hands; not so much work, per- 
haps, as one would find in an eighteen- 
acre vineyard; yet John Burroughs's 



52 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

eighteen acres certainly proved to be no 
check — rather, indeed, a stimulus — 
to his writing. He seems to have gath- 
ered a volume out of every acre; and 
he seems to have put a good acre into 
every volume. "Fresh Fields" is the 
name of one of the volumes, " Leaf and 
Tendril" of another; but the freshness 
of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils 
of his vineyard, enter into them all. 
The grapes of the vineyard are in them 
also. 

Here is a growth of books out of the 
soil, books that have been trimmed, 
trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. 
Such books may not be altogether ac- 
cording to the public taste; they will 
keep, however, until the public acquires 
a better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 53 

and late, a full crop ! Has the vineyard 
anything to do with it ? 

It is not every farmer who should go 
to writing, nor every writer who should 
go to farming; but there is a mighty 
waste of academic literature, of prema- 
ture, precocious, lily-handed literature, 
of chicken-licken literature, because the 
writers do not know a spade when they 
see one, would not call it a spade if they 
knew. Those writers need to do less 
writing and more farming, more real 
work with their soft hands in partnership 
with the elemental forces of nature, or 
in comradeship with average elemental 
m en — the only species extant of the 
quality to make writing worth while. 

John Burroughs had this labor, this 
partnership, this comradeship. His writ- 



54 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

ing is seasoned and sane. It is ripe, and 
yet as fresh as green corn with the dew 
in the silk. You have eaten corn on the 
cob just from the stalk and steamed in 
its own husk ? Green corn that is corn, 
that has all its milk and sugar and flavor, 
is corn on the cob, and in the husk — 
is cob and kernel and husk — not a 
stripped ear that is cooked into the 
kitchen air. 

Literature is too often stripped of its 
human husk, and cut from its human 
cob: the man gone, the writer left; the 
substance gone, the style left — corn that 
tastes as much like corn as it tastes like 
puffed rice — which tastes like nothing 
at all. There is the sweetness of the 
husk, the flavor of the cob, the substance 
of the uncut corn to John Burroughs. 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 55 

There is no lack of cob and husk to 
Thoreau — of shell and hull, one should 
say, for he is more like a green walnut 
than an ear of green corn. Thoreau is 
very human, a whole man ; but he is 
almost as much a tree, and a mountain, 
and a pond, and a spell of weather, and 
a state of morals. He is the author of 
" Walden," and nobody else in the world 
is that ; he is a lover of Nature, as ardent 
a lover as ever eloped with her ; he is a 
lover of men, too, loving them with an 
intensity that hates them bag and bag- 
gage; he is poetical, prophetic, para- 
doxical, and utterly impossible. 

But he knew it. Born in Concord, 
under the transcendental stars, at a time 
when Delphic sayings and philosophy, 
romance and poetry ran wild in the 



56 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

gardens where Bouncing-Bet and Way- 
ward Charlie now run wild, Thoreau 
knew that he was touched, and that all 
his neighbors were touched, and sought 
asylum at Walden. But Walden was not 
distant enough. If John Burroughs in 
Roxbury, New York, found it necessary 
to take to the woods in order to escape 
from Emerson, then Thoreau should 
have gone to Chicago, or to Xamiltepec. 
It is the strain, in Thoreau, that 
wearies us ; his sweating among the 
stumps and woodchucks, for a bean crop 
netting him eight dollars, seventy-one 
and one half cents. But such beans! 
Beans with minds and souls ! Yet, for 
baking, plain beans are better than these 
transcendental beans, because your trans- 
cendental beans are always baked with- 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES $ 7 

out pork. A family man, however, can- 
not contemplate that piddling patch with 
any patience, even though he have a 
taste for literature as real as his taste for 
beans. It is better to watch John Bur- 
roughs pruning his grapevines for a crop 
to net him one thousand, three hundred 
and twenty-live dollars, and no cents, 
and no half-cents. Here were eighteen 
acres to be cultivated, whose fruit was 
to be picked, shipped, and sold in the 
New York markets at a profit — a 
profit plainly felt in John Burroughs's 
books. 

Reading what I have just said, as it 
appeared in the "Atlantic" for Novem- 
ber, 1 9 1 o, Burroughs wrote in the course 
of a letter to me : 

" I feel like scolding you a little for 



58 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

disparaging Thoreau for my benefit. 
Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. 
I may be more human, but he is as cer- 
tainly more divine. His moral and ethi- 
cal value I think is much greater, and 
he has a heroic quality that I cannot 
approach. " 

Perhaps no truer word will ever be 
said of these two men than that ; and 
certainly no more generous word was 
ever spoken by one great writer of an- 
other, his nearest rival. I have not, nor 
would I, disparage Thoreau for Bur- 
roughs's benefit. Thoreau dwells apart. 
He is long past all disparagement. 
« Walden Pond" and "The Week," if 
not the most challenging, most original 
books in American literature, are, with 
Whitman's " Leaves of Grass " and 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 59 

Emerson's " Essays/' among those books. 

Thoreau and Burroughs had almost 
nothing in common except their love 
of nature, and in that they were farther 
apart than in anything else, Thoreau 
searching by night and day in all wild 
places for his lost horse and hound while 
Burroughs quietly worshiped, as his rural 
divinity, the ruminating cow. 

The most worthy qualities of good 
writing are those least noticeable — neg- 
ative qualities of honesty, directness, 
sincerity, euphony; noticeable only by 
their absence. Yet in John Burroughs 
they amounted to a positive charm. In- 
deed, are not these same negative quali- 
ties the very substance of good style? 
Such style as is had by a pair of pruning- 
shears, as is embodied in the exquisite 



60 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

lines of a flying swallow — the style that 
is perfect, purposeful adaptability? 

But there is more than efficiency to John 
Burroughs's style; there are strengths and 
graces existing in and for themselves. 
Here is a naturalist who has studied the 
art of writing. " What little merit my 
style has," he declares, "is the result of 
much study and discipline." And whose 
style, if it be style at all, is not the result 
of much study and discipline ? Flourish, 
fine-writing, wordiness, obscurity, and 
cant are exorcised in no other way; and 
as for the "limpidness, sweetness, fresh- 
ness," which John Burroughs says should 
characterize outdoor writing, and which 
do characterize his writing, how else 
than by study and discipline shall they 
be obtained? 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 61 

Outdoor literature, no less than other 
types of literature, is both form and mat- 
ter ; the two are mutually dependent, in- 
separably one; but the writer is most 
faithful to the form when he is most 
careful of the matter. It makes a vast 
difference whether his interest is absorbed 
by what he has to say, or by the possible 
ways he may say it. If John Burroughs 
wrote in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent 
critic says he did, it was because he went 
about his writing as he went about his 
vineyarding — for grapes, for thoughts, 
and not to see how pretty he could make 
a paragraph look, or into what fantastic 
form he could train a vine. The vine is 
lovely in itself — if it bear fruit. 

And so is language. Take John Bur- 
roughs's manner in any of its moods : its 



62 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

store of single, sufficient words, for in- 
stance, especially the homely, rugged 
words and idioms, and the flavor they 
give, is second to the work they do ; or 
take his use of figures — when he speaks 
of DeQuincey's " discursive, roundabout 
style, herding his thoughts as a collie 
dog herds sheep " — and unexpected, 
vivid, apt as they are, they are even more 
effective. One is often caught up by the 
poetry of these essays and borne aloft, 
but never on a gale of words ; the lift 
and sweep are genuine emotion and 
thought. 

As an essayist — as a nature- writer I 
ought to say — John Burroughs's literary 
care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen 
as in the simple architecture of his essay 
plans, in their balance and finish, a qual- 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 63 

ity that distinguishes him from others 
of the craft, and that neither gift nor 
v chance could so invariably supply. The 
common fault of outdoor books is the 
catalogue — raw data, notes. There are 
paragraphs of notes in John Burroughs, 
volumes of them in Thoreau. The aver- 
age nature-writer sees not too much of 
nature, but knows all too little of literary 
values; he sees everything, gets a mean- 
ing out of nothing; writes it all down; 
and gives us what he sees, which is pre- 
cisely what everybody may see ; whereas, 
we want also what he thinks and feels. 
Some of our present writers do nothing 
but feel and divine and fathom — the 
animal psychologists, whatever they are. 
The bulk of nature-writing, however, 
is journalistic, done on the spot, into a 



64 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

notebook, as were the journals of Tho- 
reau — fragmentary, yet with Thoreau 
often exquisite fragments — bits of old 
stained glass, unleaded, and lacking unity 
and design. 

No such fault can be found with John 
Burroughs. He went pencilless into the 
woods, and waited before writing until his 
return home, until time had elapsed for 
the multitudinous details of the trip to 
blur and blend, leaving only the domi- 
nant facts and impressions for his pen. 
Every part of his work is of selected 
stock, as free from knots and seams and 
sapwood as a piece of old-growth pine. 
There is plan, proportion, integrity to 
his essays — the naturalist living faith- 
fully up to a sensitive literary con- 
science. 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 65 

John Burroughs was a good but not a 
great naturalist, as Audubon and Gray 
were great naturalists. His claim (and 
Audubon's in part) upon us is literary. 
He was a watcher in the woods ; he made 
a few pleasant excursions into the prime- 
val wilderness, leaving his gun at home, 
and his camera, too, thank Heaven! He 
^ broke out no new trail, discovered no 
new animal, no new thing. But he saw 
all the old, uncommon things, saw them 
oftener, watched them longer, through 
more seasons, than any other writer of 
our out-of-doors; and though he dis- 
covered no new thing, yet he made 
discoveries, volumes of them — contri- 
butions largely to our stock of literature, 
and to our store of love for the earth, 
and to our joy in living upon it. He 



66 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

turned a little of the universe into liter- 
ature ; translated a portion of the earth 
into human language; restored to us our 
garden here eastward in Eden — apple- 
tree and all. 

For a real taste of fruity literature, 
try John Burroughs's chapter on "The 
Apple. " Try Thoreau's, too, — if you 
are partial to squash-bugs. There are 
chapters in John Burroughs, such as "Is 
it going to Rain?" "A River View," 
" A Snow-Storm, " which seem to me as 
perfect, in their way, as anything that 
has ever been done — single, simple, 
beautiful in form, and deeply significant; 
the storm being a piece of fine descrip- 
tion, of whirling snow across a geologic 
landscape, distant, and as dark as eter- 
nity; the whole wintry picture lighted 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 67 

and warmed at the end by a glowing 
touch of human life : 

"We love the sight of the brown and 
ruddy earth ; it is the color of life, while 
V a snow-covered plain is the face of 
death ; yet snow is but the mark of life- 
giving rain ; it, too, is the friend of man 
— the tender, sculpturesque, immacu- 
late, warming, fertilizing snow." 

There are many texts in these vol- 
umes, many themes ; and in them all 
there is one real message: that this is a 
good world to live in ; that these are 
good men and women to live with ; that 
life is good, here and now, and alto- 
gether worth living. 



V 



Ill 

It was in October that I last saw him — 
atWoodchuck Lodge. November 22 he 
wrote: 

• I neglected to make any apologies for 
the long letter I wrote you the other 
day. I promise not to do so again. lam 
enclosing an old notebook of mine, filled 
with all sorts of jottings as you will see. 
I send it for a keepsake. 

We are off for California to-morrow. 
Hope to be there in early December. 
We leave Chicago on the 29th. My 
address there will be La Jolla y San Diego. 
Good luck to you and yours. 
Always your friend 

John Burroughs 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 69 

He kept his promise too too well. This 
was the last letter I ever had from him. 
He dreaded that California journey. 
San Diego is a long, long way from 
Woodchuck Lodge when one is nearing 
eighty-four. Dr. Barrus and two of her 
nieces made the trip with him, Henry 
Ford, out of his friendship, meeting the 
expenses of the winter sojourn. But Cal- 
ifornia had no cure for the winter that 
\a had at last fallen upon the old natural- 
ist. Sickness, and longing for home, and 
other ills befell him. He was in a hos- 
pital for many days. But visitors came 
to see him as usual; he went among the 
schools speaking ; nor was his pen idle 
— not yet ; one of the last things, if not 
the very last he wrote for publication, 
being a vigorous protest against free 



70 THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 

verse, called "The Reds of Literature/' 
But all the while he was thinking of 
home, and planning for his birthday 
party at the Lodge back on the ancestral 
farm. 

We celebrated it. He was there. 
But he did not know. On the third 
day of April, his eighty-fourth birth- 
day, followed by a few of his friends, 
mourned by all the nation, he was laid 
to rest in the hill pasture, beside the 
boulder on which he had played as a 
child, and where only a few months be- 
fore he had taken me to see the glory 
of hill and sky that had been his life- 
long theme, and that were to be his 
sleep forever. 

He died on the train that was bring- 
ing him back from California, his last de- 



THE SEER OF SLABSIDES 71 

sire not quite fulfilled. He was a wholly 
human man ; and an utterly simple man ; 
and so true to himself, that his last words, 
uttered on the speeding train, expressed 
and completed his whole life with sin- 
gular beauty: "How far are we from 
home/' he asked, — and the light failed; 
and the train sped on as if there were 
need of hurry now ! 

" Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea, 
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate 
For lo ! my own shall come to me/' 



THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



I 



